Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated circuit chip and a method therefore.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, along with complication of an apparatus, the apparatus is often constituted of a plurality of integrated circuit chips. This is for the purpose of performing parallel processing by the plurality of integrated circuit chips. However, each integrated circuit chip needs a ROM which stores programs and a RAM which stores in-process data temporarily to operate a CPU in the integrated circuit chip.
To deal with such a situation, a cost reduction by decreasing the number of components which constitute the apparatus is important. There is a technique of eliminating the ROM of the other integrated circuit chip by transmitting the programs from one integrated circuit chip to the other integrated circuit chip. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-99517 (to be referred to as literature 1 hereinafter) discloses this technique.
In literature 1, a master chip and a slave chip are manufactured individually in accordance with their functions.
However, costs and man-hours required for development may be increased by manufacturing the master chip and the slave chip individually as described above. To cope with this, identical chips can form chips which play roles of a master and a slave. However, the role of the chip as the master or the slave is decided at the time of manufacture. In literature 1, a chip manufactured as the master chip exhibits its function only as the master. It is therefore impossible to decide its operation contents depending on the set role as described above.